Posts Tagged ‘Sicario’

Sicario is some beautiful bullshit. Sumptuous cinematography abounds and yet I cannot glean the point of this film beyond a simple display of badass moments. There is a view taken by quite a few critics that Sicario is a blunt presentation of the marginalization of women and minorities involving issues, in this case the drug war. And it is, sure, but it is not much of a critique. Emily Blunt’s character Kate Mercer is set up as our audience surrogate but then pushed out and left standing on the sidelines at every moment. Literally every moment! Kate is devoid of agency every step of the way and yet she keeps coming back because the screenplay demands it. When the film shifts focus in the late third and follows Alejandro (Benecio Del Toro) on his one man plantation raid, Sicario has fully abandoned any sense of lesson or sly allegory and has decided to just be “fucking badass”. Showing us unrelated scenes of a random corrupt cop only to quickly dispatch him feels like a hollow afterthought. Do we really get the corruption and wrongheadedness of the operation? Sorta, but the film doesn’t even add up, if you consider that everything that has happened was done by the government for Alejandro because, why? They owed him a favor? The man-hours and effort involved does not seem worth it. Maybe that is the point. But Kate pointing her gun off the balcony feels like a weak feint at meaning.